Visit a campus today. Cross the leafy quadrangle and you’ll
find 18-21-year-old students carrying textbooks to lectures
and discussions assessed with letter grades, accounted by
credit hours, with course numbers ranging from 101 to

499, on transcripts embossed with a registrar’s seal. All of
these features were firmly in place more than a century
ago. They continue today for a simple reason: faculty
members are guided in their educational tasks by tradition
rather than scholarship. Largely untrained in teaching and
unfamiliar with education research, they teach the way
they were taught.

Why is this? A continuously critical, scholarly approach is
the norm in research work. In this scholarly work, decision
making, planning, and behavior consult evidence of all
kinds, weighing most heavily relevant results of well-designed studies. This standard defines the hallmarks of
faculty life: regular demonstrations of competence, both in
peer-reviewed publications and in public presentations at
conferences and colloquia. A rigorous, scholarly approach
is applied when practitioners believe a topic belongs to the
world of evidence rather than art.

There are many areas of life in which rigorous researchersabandon this scholarly approach to decision-making. All ofour personal lives are filled with decisions governed by habitor whim. In their university service, faculty members relyheavily on tradition: admitting students and selecting newfaculty in time-honored, rather than critically examined,ways. It is in teaching where this problem is the worst. Fewfaculty members feel pressure to learn anything more thananecdotal about teaching or learning. As a result, mostteaching proceeds by tradition, with courses taught as theywere taken, or as recently taught.

Why don’t faculty members take a more critical, evidence-based approach to teaching?

Some would make the clinical objection. In their
minds, only an expert practitioner observing educational
interactions directly can make appropriate assessments of
learning. They know it when they see it, but think it can’t be
quantified. Others have concerns about generalizability. For
them, education is essentially personal, and must be tailored
to the unique circumstances of every individual. Then there
are concerns about measurement. Do we really have the data
we need to rigorously study education?

These objections are not new. They have been regularly
raised, particularly in the human sciences. The history
of medicine is replete with examples of discoveries made,
ignored, lost, and eventually rediscovered. One of the
most famous and tragic is the tale of Ignac Semmelweis,
eloquently told in Sherwin Nuland’s recent book. 1 In the
late 1840s, Semmelweis discovered that simple handwashing

BUILDING A COMMUNITYOF LIFELONG LEARNINGTIMOTHY McKAY

All across the landscape of higher education, faculty members are committed to critical thought. Theytake nothing for granted, question assertions, unsettle expectations. They insist on it in research anddesign courses to provoke it in students. Continuous critique and insistent rigor drive disciplinesforward. So why are colleges and universities among our society’s most tradition-bound organizations?